Empowering women in the maritime community

This year the World Maritime Day intends to raise awareness over one of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): gender equality.

The Research Executive Agency (REA i) is delighted to manage Horizon 2020 research projects that seek to achieve gender parity in the maritime sector through various actions, such as offering career and training opportunities to women in this field and including women scientists in the research teams' decision-making. Here a few examples:

ClimeFish

In the EU i, women are still largely excluded from fisheries management systems such as cooperatives and policy development. To revert this reality, the EU-funded project ClimeFish has designed a gender-sensitive Decision Support Framework (DSF) to ensure sustainable fish production in Europe under climate change. How? By involving female participation at stakeholders’ events and discussions.

Since 2016, this project works to ensure that any increase in seafood production comes from areas and species where there is a sustainable growth potential in terms of employment and development of rural and coastal communities. With an international network of stakeholders, the project is developing early-warning methodologies for both the fishery and aquaculture sectors. The project team is also identifying a range of strategies to help mitigate climate change risks in the sector.

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SEAFOODTOMORROW

This project gives women two leading roles: one, the team of researchers behind this project includes highly qualified female scientists; and two, the research itself focuses on the different impacts that seafood can have on pregnant women and other population groups.

SeaFoodTomorrow has brought together aspiring chefs from six European catering schools in Belgium, Spain, France, Poland, Portugal and Sweden to create seafood recipes using sustainable species in a Recipes Contest that concluded last summer.

The project challenged participants to create delicious recipes nutritionally aimed at pregnant women, children and seniors, using locally sourced and sustainable fish, reducing the salt content and enhancing the taste of the fish. This contest allowed chefs to demonstrate the potential of overlooked species - such as horse mackerel, carp and herring - and raise awareness of sustainability in the seafood industry. The recipes will then be disseminated through a digital recipe book and produced industrially.

PrimeFish

This project includes female scientists in the development of strategic planning tools that could integrate women in decision-making. The project analysed consumer behaviour and market trends in the main European seafood markets. It explored price fluctuations, government regulations on seafood trading, why seafood products fail on markets, and why the industry is not meeting current consumer demand and expectations. PrimeFish created and advanced toolbox to estimate the willingness of consumers to pay for specific features of seafood products or salient product attributes — wild-caught or farmed fish, health claims and sustainability labelling.

Happy World Maritime Day!